Getting involved

There is now a mailing list for this reading group. Send me (Damien) an email to get on it. No problem.

Note: this reading group is about deep learning as applied to depth estimation from a single image - one of the super hot topics. If your interest is deep learning in general, you may find some of the readings a little bit off-topic. So let me know if you want some idea about which you should read for.

Proposed Schedule

Warning: This is now out of date. We are arranging via the email list now.**

If that doesn't work (some have reported finding it difficult to access Chapter 6), try the following link: http://tinyurl.com/yalnnwp9 - some have reported being able to access the chapter by doing a google search for content.

Another thing to try that has worked for some is to log out of any google/gmail account before trying to access.

If nothing else works, email me.

Saxena, Min & Ng: Make3D

This is the classic paper that brought machine learning to the problem of depth from a single image, quite successfully, considering previous attempts. It uses Markov Random Fields, which are a bit advanced but, importantly, quite slow.

Note: because our library has a subscription to IEEE Xplore, you can access the above link from on-campus or via off-campus library access or via VPN.

Karsch, Liu & Kang: Depth Transfer

This is a nonparametric approach to depth from a single image. They search a database of images similar to the observed one then aligns the found image with the observed one then warps the found image retrieved from the database to estimate the depth of the current image. It depends on an approach called SIFTFlow to do the alignment.

These topics are also addressed in the tutorials shared just above (or you will find plenty online and most neural network tutorials attempt to explain backpropagation as it is the main way these networks are trained - I usually use a simple genetic algorithm when explaining how to train neural networks because it's simpler - an accelerated tutorial of neural networks without explaining backpropagation but explaining one of the tools is at http://files.djduff.net/nn.zip ).

LeCun, Bottou, Bengio & Haffner: CNNs

This is the now classic paper describing LeNet architectures applying Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to the problem of optical character recognition. It also embeds the neural network in an architecture for automatically segmenting text, including a system for automatically reading cheques.

Girshick, Donahue, Darrell & Malik: R-CNN

We take a slight segue to check out how tracking has been done recently with neural networks. Note that Faster-RCNN and more recent alternatives use similar principles but do it faster. Here we look at the older paper so that we can discuss some of the fundamentals.